“This tutorial will cover some of Yii’s more basic concepts related to its implementation of the MVC framework: Models, Views and Controllers. We’ll also explore layouts and customization of navigation menus and Bootstrap elements.

For these examples, we’ll imagine we’re building a framework for posting simple status updates, e.g. our own mini-Twitter. However, we won’t go so far as to store the data in a database. I’ll save that for the next tutorial, which will explore Yii’s scaffolding capability, called Gii.

Gii automates and simplifies everything we’ll do in this tutorial, but it’s important to walk through the basic concepts and perform these tasks manually at least once.”